MAKE THEM PAY: UT Austin Administrators Tried to Punish Professor over Anti-DEI Crusade. He’s Fighting Back.

University of Texas at Austin finance professor Richard Lowery has annoyed the university’s administration by publicly criticizing its embrace of diversity, equity, and inclusion and suggesting that administrators exploit their positions for their children’s admission.

Lowery’s crusade did not go unnoticed: Several university administrators — and the university president, Jay Hartzell — responded with a “campaign to silence” the professor, which included threatening his job, salary, professional affiliations, and research opportunities, according to a lawsuit Lowery filed against the administrators.

Lowery embraces the fact that his views are unpopular on campus. His bio on his now-private Twitter account reads: “All opinions are mine and almost certainly diametrically opposed to those of my employer.”

Lowery became unpopular on campus by criticizing the UT Austin’s sprawling DEI bureaucracy, which costs $13 million annually in salaries alone. The UT Austin “Faculty Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Strategic Plan” requires that “all members of faculty search committees must participate in diverse hiring training” and invests $3 million over four years to support “recruitment and hiring of faculty contributing to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The focus on DEI is exemplified by a UT Austin research program that offers a voluntary four-week study for white four- and five-year-old children and their white caregivers to learn about “anti-Black racism.” Lowery criticized the project in an op-ed for the College Fix, writing, “Imagine if such training were to be focused only on black preschool-aged children, a subset the researchers deemed deficient in patriotism.”

In response to Lowery’s public criticism of the university, Hartzell and several senior administrators pressured his supervisor at the Salem Center — a research center at the business school of UT Austin — to discipline him, according to the lawsuit. (While he likely couldn’t be fired from his tenured position as a professor, Lowery’s role at the Salem Center came with a $20,000-a-year stipend and is renewed annually.)

Possibly related: Sources: At least 20 UT employees linked to DEI to lose their jobs.

Add a zero to this and we’ll get somewhere.